An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, October 4, 2015

The Man Who Could Not Go Home Again —Thomas Wolfe

The Playbill from the original 1958 Broadway production of Look Homward Angel with Tony Perkins as Eugene Gant. Not quite a decade later a high school production introduced me to Thomas Wolfe.

It
was 1966.With typical ambition Elaine Zelznick, the young drama teacher and theater director at Niles
West High School in Skokie, Illinois
had selected a noted Broadway serious
drama as the class play.Look Homeward, Angel was a bittersweet but lyrical evocation of life in an early 20th Century small Southerncity as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young man coming of age.Adapted from a well known novel by Ketti Frings, the play had earned six Tony Award nominations and the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The
leading role of Eugene Gant
naturally went to the school’s acknowledged starMurray Moss, who
both he and Miss Zelznick was convinced was the next Marlon Brando.And he dazzled
delivering lines of dialog that could and did move an audience to awe and
tears.I was given a small part as a townsman—so small that I can’t remember who I was playing.Certainly less than six lines of
dialogue.But I was thrilled to be a
part of a project that everyone involved with took with high minded artistic convictions.

The
Samuel French script from which we
work noted that the play was based on a novel by someone named Thomas Wolfe.I had never heard of him, but I searched
out the fat book.I found a paperback copy among my mother’s large
collection of important or bestselling
novels.One evening I opened it up
the book to the prelude:

. . a stone, a
leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone
we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from
the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable
prison of this earth.

Which of us has
known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us
has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and
alone?

O waste of lost,
in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder,
lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost
lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by
the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I
was blown away as only a 17 year old
can be blown away.Awe struck.I had never read prose like that. I read all night getting maybe 200 hundred
pages into the thickest novel I had ever seen.And my life literally changed.I
wanted to do that.I wanted more than
anything to write with that kind of power and grandeur.I wanted to be the
next Thomas Wolfe, the next Great
American novelist.

I
was not the only one.Wolfe had that effect
on a lot of people, most notably Jack
Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth each of whom adored
him.Pat Conroy may have summed it up for the rest of them, “My writing
career began the instant I finished Look
Homeward, Angel.”

Of
course I never became a novelist, let alone a great one.But I did spend years writing short stories that tried to capture
that eloquence in a bottle.But no one could match Wolfe, and it was fatal
to try.Would-be lyrical passages were too often simply florid and excessive.It took time and a heavy dose of Ernest Hemmingway’s economical and
pared down prose to strip the worst of it from my writing.

But
regular readers of this blog and
other scribbling might sometimes detect echoes of that rich and evocative
language.Forgive me.Like malaria,
you never quite get over Thomas Wolfe.

Thomas Wolfe

Wolfe
was born on October 3, 1900 in the North
Carolina Piedmont city of Asheville.He was the youngest of eight children and the
closest sibling to his ambitious and domineering mother, the former Julia
Elizabeth Westall.She kept upscale boarding houses and dabbled, eventually
successfully, in real estate.His father William Oliver Wolfe was already 50 years old when his youngest son
was born, a decade older than his wife.He was a stone carver and
owned a monument company.Both of them and his siblings became key characters
in his autobiographical first novel.

The
relationship between his parents had cooled. When Julia Wolfe returned from a successful
stay in St. Louis where she had
operated a boarding house serving visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair, she used the money she had earned to buy a large new
boarding house she named Old Kentucky
Home at 48 Spruce Street in Asheville.Julia moved in there with young Thomas while his father and the other
children stayed in their old home.

The
boy grew up in that house amid the mix of lodgers
and visitors and the tension between
his parents.He idolized his father and his older
brothers, particularly Ben, his
closest sibling in age who was eight years older.The boy must have been a sponge.He absorbed it all,
as well as life in Asheville and many of the town’s residents.

Julia Wolfe's Asheville boarding house The Old Kentucky Home in 1906. That's young Thomas out front.

Wolfe
was precocious enough, and his family prosperous enough, to enroll him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 15.Despite his youth he was both a popular student and an academic stand out.He was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi
Kappa Phi fraternity.He was recognized
as an outstanding writer as rose to the editorship of the Daily Tar Heel and was
awarded a prize for a philosophic essay.

After
the trauma of his brother Ben’s early death in 1918, Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting class.The future master of descriptive prose was
inspired to become a dramatist.The
Return of Buck Gavin his first one
act play was one of the first produced
by the newly formed Carolina
Playmakers.The troop also staged
another of his plays, The Third Night.

Wolfe graduated in
1920 and went on to Harvard University
for graduate studies that fall where
he studied playwriting under George
Pierce Baker. Baker’s 47 Workshop, a student theatrical group which mounted plays developed in his
classes, did two separate versions of Wolfe’s The Mountains in 1921.

Wolf
earned his Master’s Degree in June
of 1922.His father died the same month, another shattering experience for the young
man.Despite the loss, he returned to
Harvard for another year of work under Baker.The 47 Workshop produced his most ambitious work yet, a 10 scene Welcome
to Our City in May 1923.The
play drew attention beyond the University community.

In
1923 Wolfe received a modest stipend
to go to New York City as a fund raiser for his original alma mater, the University of North
Carolina.The job left plenty of time
for the young writer to try to peddle
his plays to producers.He had no luck.In ’24 he took a teaching position at New
York University, which would somewhat
sporadically be his academic home
for the next seven years.

For
a short while in 1924 it looked like the Theater
Guild might be willing to produce Welcome
to Our City but it was eventually rejected as too long and unwieldy.Wolfe could not bring himself to cut the
script to a more manageable length.

Somewhat
discouraged in October of ’24 Wolfe sailed for England and the Continent to
expand his provincial horizons and work
on his writing.He had concluded that
his talents lay not as a playwright, but as a novelist.

Wolfe's older lover and mentor Esther Bernstein.

Sailing
home to New York in 1925 Wolfe met the beautiful,
sophisticated, and intelligent older “Jewess” who became a tempestuous
lover, muse, and mentor.Aline Bernstein was a noted costume designer for the Theater Guild
and the married mother of two.She was 18 years older than her protégée.The relationship was sometimes stormy and always intense.But Bernstein
encouraged the writer and promoted his career.She became the model of Esther
Jack, an important character in
Wolf’s last three novels.

With
her encouragement, Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926 where he began work on his
highly experimental first epic
novel, O Lost.He completed a draft back in New York.Aline helped get it into the hands Scribner’s, the most important literary
publishing house in the country, already the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway.His 1,100 page manuscript landed on the desk of the most respected
editor in the business, Maxwell Perkins.

Perkins
immediately recognized that the book needed significant paring.Despite
Wolfe’s anguish, he cut well over
half of the text, eliminating most of the experimental
elements and concentrating on the autobiographical character of Eugene Gant.Despite the ruthless editing, Wolfe grew close to Perkins and came to regard him
as a surrogate father.Perkins returned the affection and treated Wolfe like a son.

Editor and surrogate father, Maxwell Perkins.

And
not everything cut was lost.Much of the
material became the core of a second novel.

The
book was published under the new title of Look Homeward, Angel just days before the stock market crash of 1929.That might have affected sales.The initial publication was only a modest
commercial success.But it was a critical triumph.Praise was almost unanimous and unusually
effusive, although some critics like Bernard
DeVoto would come to praise Perkins’s editing over Wolfe’s undisciplined genius.DeVoto later described the book as “hacked
and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and
the assembly-line at Scribner’s.”

The
publication certainly changed Wolfe’s life.He was shocked by the angry
reaction of his hometown of Asheville where over 200 of his family members
and neighbors recognized themselves as characters in the novel.Most were not pleased.It caused a rift in his family, especially
with his prickly mother.Only one sister
remained supportive.He was the target
of such invective that Wolfe was afraid to return to Asheville for eight years.

He
dedicated the book to Bernstein, but broke off his relationship with her
shortly after it came out.Depressed and
drinking heavily Wolfe left for Europe supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.There
he found a warmer reception with the public.The book was a best seller in England
and its dense style meshed with German literary tastes.

Upon
return using unpublished fragments
of the first book and lots of new material, he produced another massive manuscript
The
October Fair continuing the story of Eugene Gant as he establishes a literary career and prominently
featuring Esther Jack.It was an arduous, four year process.Wolfe worked in his Brooklyn apartment, writing long hand on legal tablets standing up
and using the top of his refrigerator as a desk.

Once
again Perking wrestled a single, managed to wrest a single volume, Of
Time and the River. The book was not only a critical success this time,
but a popular one as well.It shot to
the top of the best seller lists in 1936.Wolfe was acclaimed as one of the great writers of his generation, if
not the greatest.Peers like Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner joined in the chorus of cheers.

When
the book became a success, Wolfe heard once again from Ashville. It turned out
that people this time felt snubbed that they were left out of the new
book.And there were still whispers that
Perkins was the Svengali behind the
writer.

Despite
their continued personal affection and friendship, this caused a professional rupture.Wolfe abandoned Scribner’s for Harper Bros. and a new editor, Edward Aswell.

While
working on a new manuscript with his autobiographical doppelganger’s name changed to George
Webber, Wolfe returned to Europe, spending significant time in Germany
where his work was especially admired.But on this trip Wolfe became alarmed by the open persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime.

Unlike
other writers, Wolfe had never been very political,
but on his return from Europe he felt compelled to speak out.He published a
widely read and influential short story I Have a Thing to Tell You in the
mildly leftist The New Republic.

In
1938 Wolfe delivered another huge, amorphous manuscript about George Webber on
Aswell’s desk.He then embarked on a western train tour that began with a
lecture at Indiana University and
continued on a long dreamed of tour of
westernNational Parks and Monuments.

My
friend and fellow workerUtah Phillips quoted
Wolfe’s longings in the spoken word
introduction to his railroad song
masterpieceStarlight on the Rails.

Oh, I will go up
and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West
where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the
two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of
the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?

It
was a trip of a life time and Wolfe was taking copious notes and writing sketches for the inclusion in a future
book.But he fell ill with a serious repertory infection and was hospitalized in Seattle.Pneumonia filled his lungs and he did not respond to
treatment.

His
worried sister Mable closed the
boarding house she was running in Washington
to be with him.She brought him back
across the country for treatment at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore where
doctors were planning emergency surgery
to relieve pressure on the brain from fluid buildup.Before
slipping into a coma Wolfe dictated a last fond message to
Perkins.

The
brain operation reviled significant damage to the right side of the brain from miliary tuberculosis.On September 6, 1938 Wolfe died less than
a month before his 38th birthday.His body was returned at last to Ashville
where it was laid in a family plot
beside his parents and siblings.

At
Harper’s Aswell carved two novels from Wolfe’s final manuscript, The
Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again published in
1939 and ’40 respectively.Both were
critical and popular successes.

The paperback edition of Wolfe's posthumous novel.

Aline
Bernstein also had a large number of Wolfe manuscripts, mostly short stories
and fragments of planned longer works that he had abandoned with her following
their break-up.Much of that material was published posthumously over the years
in various forms.

Despite
the high esteem in which he was held when he died, by the ‘50’s his reputation
was in steep decline with harsh criticism by Hemmingway
characterizing him as “the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature.”Former admirer Faulkner also became
critical.Academic writers could not
neatly place him in a continuing tradition, expect acknowledging him as a
pioneer of autobiographical fiction.His
elaborate style seemed passé.

Wolfe
has nearly disappeared from college
literature surveys and anthologies.

But
many of us will always love him.And
there are signs of a critical
reassessment.Matthew Bruccoli, best known as a Fitzgerald Scholar recreated as
far as possible from surviving manuscripts the original version of O Lost, the book from which Perkins
extracted Look Homeward, Angel.Many now understand Wolfe’s original
vision, and some have even come to consider the sprawling experiment greater
than the familiar novel.

Back
in Ashville, Wolfe’s childhood home, the boarding house his mother called Old
Kentucky Home, is now a state owned
monument and museum.A Thomas
Wolfe Society keeps his memory alive in an academic journal, with frequent
conferences, and by making awards of the Wolf Scholarship.